Messages
by inkstainedfingers97
Summary: There, in the recesses of the closet, she buried her nose in the stained collar of his shirt, breathing in deeply. It smelled faintly of detergent and oolong tea. She filled her lungs with the scent, half-hoping it would wind its way into her heart and assure her that what she feared couldn't possibly true.


A/N: This fic is a thank you gift for the lovely Chiisana Minako, who requested Lisbon + Jane's shirt.

Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, and I'm certainly not making any money off them.

Spoilers: Tag for 4x24, The Crimson Hat.

Rating: Teen, I guess.

xxxxx

The first message went like this: "Look, I know it looks bad right now. Wainwright is pretty pissed. But we can talk him down, I'm sure of it. I'll swing by later and we can figure out our plan of attack."

The second: "Are you okay? I'm worried about you. This whole thing with Wainwright… it isn't like you. Please let me know you're all right."

By the third, she was feeling irritated. "Is this part of some convoluted plan you haven't told me about? Because if so, I'm going to hurt you very badly, Patrick Jane. Tell me you didn't just throw your job away over some half-baked scheme that's eventually going to come crumbling down around your ears."

When the fourth call went to voicemail, Lisbon had progressed from irritated to angry. "Dammit, Jane, stop being childish. You wouldn't even be in this situation if you weren't so damn arrogant. Call me back."

She left work at five and went to Jane's hotel.

She climbed the stairs to his second floor room and knocked on the door impatiently. "Jane. Come on, open up."

No answer.

She felt a slight stirring of unease in her stomach. She knocked again. Nothing.

She pulled out her phone and hit redial. "Jane, where are you? I told you I would come over, and now you're standing me up? Give me a call and I'll come meet you."

She went downstairs and stopped at the reception area.

Mr. Chen, the owner, greeted her with a smile when she entered the tiny office. "Hello, Agent Lisbon."

"Hi, Mr. Chen," she answered politely. "Sorry to bother you, but have you seen Jane lately? I was supposed to meet him here."

"Yes, I saw him this afternoon," Mr. Chen told her. "He stopped by earlier, but then he left."

"Did he mention where he was going by any chance?" Lisbon had faint hope of this. Jane was hardly given to telling anyone his plans under the best of circumstances, which these most certainly were not.

Mr. Chen shook his head. "No. He gathered his things and left."

"Gathered his things?" Lisbon repeated. "What things?"

Mr. Chen looked at her as though she were being rather slow. "His things," he repeated. "The things in his room."

"What, all of them?" Lisbon asked, startled. "His suits, and everything?"

"Yes," Mr. Chen confirmed. "He took his things, and he checked out."

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "He checked out?"

"Yes."

There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, Lisbon reasoned. He'd had a rough few days. He might have decided to go out of town. Clear his head. "Did he say when he'd be back?"

Mr. Chen shook his head. "I don't think he's coming back. He paid his bill in full."

He couldn't just… be gone. Just like that.

Couldn't he? a voice whispered in her head. Hasn't that been your secret fear, for far longer than you care to admit? You thought it would happen after Red John was caught, but you've always known, deep down, that this day would come.

Lisbon swallowed. "Can I see his room?"

Mr. Chen shrugged, indifferent. "If you like."

They trooped back upstairs, and Mr. Chen unlocked the door to room 205 for her. "Take as long as you'd like," he said kindly. "I'm going to head back to my office. The door will lock automatically when you let yourself out."

She thanked him, and he left her.

Mr. Chen was right. The room was empty. Jane didn't have much stuff, compared to the average person, but there was nothing there that indicated someone had been living there for the better part of ten years. No electric teakettle plugged into the wall. No stack of books by the bed. No folded up newspaper next to a teacup and saucer on the lone table.

She searched the place anyway.

She treated it like a crime scene, mechanically opening drawers in search of evidence that could provide some clue to the answers she sought. Where had he gone? Why had he left in the first place?

There were no answers. All the drawers were empty.

The only thing she found was a plain blue and white striped button down shirt left hanging in the back of the tiny closet, looking lonely and forlorn. She removed it from its hanger and held it up for inspection. It was an older shirt she recognized as one he used to wear often with his light gray suit. Closer examination revealed a small bleach stain on the collar, which perhaps explained why it might have fallen out of favor of late. She stroked the collar with affection and sadness, then half turned guiltily, as though expecting someone to catch her out in her moment of weakness. There was no one there, of course. She turned back to the shirt. There, in the recesses of the closet, she buried her nose in the stained collar, breathing in deeply. It smelled faintly of detergent and oolong tea, and another more masculine scent beneath it. She filled her lungs with the scent, half-hoping it would wind its way into her heart and assure her that what she feared couldn't possibly true.

She continued her search. She was possessed by a strange urge to check under the mattress, though given how thoroughly he'd cleared out the rest of the place, it seemed highly unlikely that Jane would have left behind something he thought important enough to hide, even in so conventional a spot. She awkwardly heaved the mattress up anyway, but as she'd expected, there was nothing there. Thinking of how Jane had a habit of hiding everything from notebooks to Dickens novels under his pillow when he left a room, even if she was standing right there watching him when he did it, she checked under the pillows next, in case he might have left her something there. A note, a hand-drawn map with x marks the spot… anything. But there was nothing there, either. Save for the blue and white striped shirt, the place was completely devoid of any sign that Jane had ever lived there.

She sat down on the bed with the shirt in her hand and called him again. "I'm at your place. Mr. Chen said you checked out. What's going on, Jane? Whatever it is, I can help. Just don't cut me out."

She sat there a long time, staring into space, holding the shirt in her hands and absently tracing its lines with her fingertips.

She finally roused herself and told herself sternly she shouldn't waste time waiting for Jane to finish one of his tricks. Because that's what this was. It was a trick. It was all a trick. Now you see him… now you don't. He'd be back. She just had to wait for the end of the trick, the big reveal. And then she would kill him herself, for worrying her like that. But there was no point in sitting here doing nothing while she waited for it to happen. Experience had taught her that when Jane disappeared to execute one of his schemes, he would only turn up again when he was good and ready, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do to change that. It would be fine. He'd be back, and he'd tease her for worrying. It was going to be fine. That's what she told herself, anyway.

But she took the shirt with her when she left.

Xxxx

At first, she couldn't really believe that he was gone. Her eyes kept straying to his couch in the bullpen. At least twice a week, she heard a footfall behind her in the CBI break room and for one shining moment she would be absolutely convinced that when she turned around, he would be there, sipping a cup of tea and smirking at her. But when she turned around, he was never there.

At the beginning, she was convinced he would find some way to contact her. She listened to his favorite jazz radio station in case he left some coded message for her in a song dedication. She scoured the newspapers for the personals and the classified ads, certain he would find some way of letting her know he was all right, something only she would understand—"Pepper, Daisy says hi. Love, Salt." She wouldn't have put it past him to send her a carrier pigeon, if he set his mind to it. But all the song dedications were between lovers, and neither the newspapers nor the skies held any secret messages for her.

She started to doubt her own sanity, obsessively checking for messages that were never there. At least ten times a day, she told herself that continuing to call him was absolutely ridiculous, not to mention pathetic, since the bastard had yet to return a single one of her calls.

She kept calling him anyway.

At first the messages were interrogatory in nature. "Seriously, Jane, this isn't funny anymore. Where the hell are you?"

Then: "What's your game here, anyway? Do you have some convoluted plan that is somehow still going to get me fired, even without you being here in person?"

She tried to elicit a response by appealing to his curiosity, dangling puzzles she thought he wouldn't be able to resist. Or even just by appealing to his insufferable need to show her he always had the answers. "We've got an interesting case at the moment. Right up your alley. A big family fight over Grandma's jewels. Tons of suspects, and no sign of the jewelry. I don't suppose you have any idea where an old lady might hide a two million dollar sapphire necklace, do you?" She didn't care if he answered because he couldn't resist a puzzle or because he couldn't resist rubbing his superior powers of deduction in her face. She would take what she could get.

Sometimes, she was angry. "You know, whatever you're doing, it's not going to work. You really think Red John is going to fall for whatever ridiculous scheme you've cooked up now? You've never managed to get the better of him yet, so what makes you think this time is going to be any different? Why are you so blind you can't see going after him alone is only going to result in you getting your fool self killed? You need us, Jane, whether you want to admit it or not."

Messages like these were inevitably followed by ones like this: "Look, I hate that you're doing this, but obviously there's nothing I can do to stop you from doing what you feel you need to do. Just… be safe."

Other times, she worried that this wasn't all some horrible trick he was playing on her. That his breakdown was real. That he was lost and alone somewhere, needing her help, but too stubborn to ask for it. "Look, I don't pretend to know what you're going through, Jane, but if you ever want to—if you think it would help to talk about it, I'm here. Always. You know that, right?"

Then there was this message: "Look, do you want me to say it? Fine, I'll say it. I miss you, okay? I want you to come home. But you won't, will you? Because you're a selfish jerk. I mean, would it kill you to pick up the goddamned phone? Seriously, Jane, I have exes who treat me less like the plague than you do."

After awhile, however, the weight of unanswered pleas grew to be too much to bear, so she started to leave a different kind of message. She just told him things then. Things she would have told him, if he was there, and often, things she wouldn't have needed to tell him if he was there, because he would have been able to see her thoughts written all over her face. "We had a tough case this week. A nineteen year old kid who killed his younger sister. She was thirteen. I can't help thinking you were here, you'd find some way to cheer me up. To make it better."

She told him happy things, too, things she thought he'd like to know about. "Cho's seeing someone new. A writer. They met at a book club, of all places. She's nice. You'd like her."

"Rigsby brought Ben to the office today, and he was crawling all over the place. He's growing so fast, I can't believe it. He looks so much like his father, Jane. Eats like him, too. I wish you could see him." Status updates, just in case he missed them.

She told herself to stop. What she was doing was desperate, unhealthy.

But she couldn't. He hadn't changed his phone number, or cancelled his cell service. Most importantly, she never once got a message that his mailbox was full. So she knew he was receiving her messages, even if he never responded to them. And presumably, listening to them. Despite his continued silence, she couldn't quite believe that he would delete all her messages without listening to them. That had to mean something. Maybe he got some measure of comfort from listening to the messages, just as she did from leaving them. If not… well, at the very least, the fact that his voicemail was never full told her that he was still alive, still checking his messages. So she kept calling.

She was having trouble sleeping. She didn't seem to have much of an appetite, either. Concerned, the team kept bringing her sandwiches that she couldn't eat. She didn't know how to tell them that everything she touched tasted like ash. Still, she appreciated the sentiment. She always waited a polite interval before throwing them away.

The nights, though, were the worst. Sometimes, if it got really bad, she'd get up in the middle of the night and liberate Jane's shirt from its place on the hook on the back of her closet door. She would touch the soft lines of the shirt and press her nose to it, trying to catch a whiff of his scent still on it. Those nights, she'd finally fall asleep clutching the shirt tightly in her fist, as though she were afraid it was going to get up in the middle of the night and walk away, leaving her without even that pitiful token of comfort.

Xxx

It was two months before she broke down and put the shirt on. Prior to this, she had resisted the temptation for fear that when Jane finally did come back, he would take one look at her face and somehow deduce that she'd been parading around in his clothing in her off hours while he was gone. In addition to recognizing that wearing his shirt implied a level of intimacy she and Jane had never actually shared, the mere notion of him discovering this secret vice was completely mortifying. Wearing a man's shirt was something that a lover did. Frankly, she'd never been more acutely aware that she and Jane were not lovers. Her bed felt more cold and empty than it ever had in her life. Which was crazy, because it wasn't like Jane had ever been in her bed before he'd left. His absence shouldn't have impacted that particular element of her life at all.

But one day, she'd gotten home late, after a long day on the road. She'd taken a shower to wash the grime of travel off her body, and then padded into her bedroom in her bare feet, a towel wrapped around her and her wet hair dripping onto the floor. She'd put on a clean pair of underwear and then rifled through her closet, looking for a t-shirt to sleep in. Her eyes landed on the blue and white striped shirt, on its hook on the back of the door. She hesitated only a moment, then took it down from its hook and pulled her arms through the sleeves. She buttoned up the shirt, luxuriating in the feel of the crisp cotton against her skin. She would sleep better tonight, she was certain of it. His scent surrounded her now.

She'd been foolish, before, to deny herself this small measure of relief. She'd been worrying over nothing. He wouldn't guess. Her secret was safe. She didn't need to worry about her inability to hide her feelings for him anymore.

It didn't matter now. Because he wasn't coming back.

xxxx

At four months, she stopped calling. She quit cold turkey, not trusting herself not to backslide if she allowed herself even a single text. She knew there would be no weaning herself off the connection slowly. It was an addiction, and it was destroying her as surely as Jack and Old Crow had destroyed her father.

She'd taken to wandering up to the attic from time to time when she wanted some peace and quiet. It was a relief to escape there sometimes, to get away from the worried faces of her team. She would stare out the window, and cross her arms over her chest against the chill of the unheated room without feeling the least temptation to return to the warmth of the office downstairs. If she was going to be a tragic figure, she'd prefer to do it alone.

Recently, she'd been working even later hours than usual, trying to numb herself from reality with endless reams of paperwork. She knew Jane would make fun of her for using paperwork to drown her troubles, but there was something comforting in the ritual of it, the rote mechanics of filling out report after report. Sometimes, though, her thoughts wandered off the lines of the pages and reality slammed into her sideways.

One day, this happened late at night as she was reviewing her quarterly budget report. She was alone in the office; everyone else had long since gone home for the day. The words and numbers were swimming on the page before her as she tried to make them out through a haze of exhaustion. She paused and closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose against her headache- the headache which was a quasi permanent part of her being these days due to her chronic lack of sleep. When she opened her eyes, all she could see was Jane's face, giving her that wicked grin of his. _What's the matter, Lisbon? A little grumpy because daddy didn't buy you a pony?_

She shoved her chair away from her desk, her heart pounding unreasonably hard in her chest. She got up hastily and walked to the window, trying to settle her nerves.

It was no good. She could feel his absence like a physical ache. It was like a cold, hard stone had taken up permanent residence in her chest, just behind her ribs. Like a piece of obsidian, dark and brittle. Every time her heart beat, it pressed uncomfortably against its cold, jagged edge. The ache had spread from there, the chill of it spreading from her chest to her limbs and settling into her joints. It hurt to breathe.

She took the bottle of scotch from her bottom desk drawer and poured herself a generous tumblerful of the amber liquid. She took a sip, willing the burn of the alcohol to combat the cold inside her.

She abandoned her report and walked upstairs to the attic with the scotch in hand. She couldn't muster up the energy to worry about someone catching her wandering the halls of the CBI in the middle of the night with a glass of booze in her hand. There was no one around but her, anyway. She went into the attic and wandered around the room aimlessly, not really doing anything so directed as actually pacing, but not quite able to settle down and be still, either.

Eventually, she ended up by the window again, staring out over the cityscape at night, wondering for the thousandth time since he'd left where in the world Jane might be. Perhaps he'd given up for real, gone to Mexico or Tahiti or something. Or maybe he had just gone to his true home, the house in Malibu, to live closer to his ghosts. Meanwhile, the haunting of Teresa Lisbon was happening here in Sacramento. She almost envied him, really. At least Jane's ghosts, presumably, were benevolent ones. Here, though, there was no warm and loving spirit to bring her comfort; it was the specter of his neglect which plagued her.

Suddenly she was so weary she could barely keep her eyes open. Light-headed, she reached out instinctively to steady herself against Jane's old cot. She bent down and set the glass of scotch on the floor, then sat down on the thin mattress covering the slab of wood Jane had used as a bed so often in the past. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. She knew she should go home and get some rest instead of staying up here like a lunatic, but had to acknowledge to herself that there was no way she could drive herself home in her present condition.

Jane's pillow was still there. It looked strangely inviting.

For once, she gave into temptation with hardly a second thought. She curled up on the dusty sheets of his makeshift cot, and fell asleep.

xxxx

When she woke, she was disoriented. The early light of dawn was filtering through the grimy window panes, though, and it only took her a moment to remember where she was. Her mouth tasted like sawdust and her back was stiff. She sat up slowly and glared at the cot as though it had personally insulted her. Ugh. She couldn't believe Jane used to sleep on that thing on a regular basis.

She touched her hand to her hair; it didn't seem to be its normal color. It was gray with dust. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek, too, from the dusty pillowcase. Gross.

She saw the half full tumbler of scotch on the floor and grimaced. God, she was a mess. She couldn't believe she'd actually started drinking in the office. Alone. And then come up here like some kind of pathetic, heart-broken—

This wasn't who she was.

She had a job to do, people who relied on her. She couldn't allow herself to be mired in self-pity and regret.

Jane was gone. She needed to accept that, and get on with her life.

To do that, she needed to make a change.

As the daughter of an alcoholic, she knew the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. For her, though, it wasn't the scotch that was the problem—it was the phone calls. After hitting rock bottom, she had a glass of practically untouched liquor on her hands and a phone that was burning a hole in her pocket.

She took the phone out of her pocket and scrolled to Jane's contact information, knowing as surely as she knew pouring the last fifth of scotch down the kitchen sink would have been the best cure for her father, deleting Jane's phone number entirely would be the surest way to save herself.

In the end, though, she proved she really was just like her father, after all, because she simply wasn't strong enough for that. She thought about calling him, leaving him one last message, to say good-bye. There was really no point, though. It would strain her fragile resolve to no useful end. One more call more or less at this point wouldn't make any difference to Jane. He'd already severed the tie between them; the only thing remaining to do was for her to let go.

She went home and took a shower. Afterwards, she took Jane's shirt off its hook and pressed her nose to it. It retained the essence of his scent, even after repeated washings. She thought about card tricks and paper frogs and high school dance floors.

She could keep the number in her phone, she resolved. She just couldn't call it. Not anymore.

She went back to the office, and got back to work. She started eating the sandwiches the team brought her, and when she was tempted to call him, she shut off her phone and went for long, cold walks by the river.

She took a lot of walks, and slept in his shirt every night.

Xxxx

He was back. Six months without a word, and then he was there, scaring her half to death in a church and laughing like he'd never been gone. Like he hadn't already taken years off her life with the worry he'd put her through over the past few months.

Then he was in her office, scheming and up to no good, as usual. He hugged her, which caught her off guard. He clutched her tightly, desperately, and that surprised her even more. She hesitated, and then for one, stolen moment, she indulged herself and buried her nose in the collar of his shirt, breathing in deeply. The shirt he was wearing now smelled of sweat and Ceylon tea.

He let her go; his eyes were huge and round in the dim light of her office. "Good luck, Teresa. Love you."

She thought of his scent and the sensation of the fabric of his shirt against her cheek, warm from him inside it. She closed her eyes.

_Love you, too._


End file.
